


part one

by dtkrushnics



Series: Accidents of Faith and Nature [1]
Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 23:22:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2750987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dtkrushnics/pseuds/dtkrushnics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a cas/claire/hannah road trip story about not-quite-family units</p>
            </blockquote>





	part one

It starts with a locket, small and ovular, left on the floor of a pawnshop somewhere on the corner of Middle Of and Nowhere.

Castiel is looking for maps. He used to have those lines memorized; every detour, every deviation fixed like a birthmark in the not-quite-thereness of his mind. That’s all gone now, though. Nothing but wrinkled edges and wet smudges, as though someone had left a cool glass on it long enough for the ink and intuition to slip away for good.

He spots the locket the fourth time he lifts his eyes from the burning red and blue routes of central Illinois. It’s gold, or else some other alloy that plays at being gold. He can’t tell the difference anymore. With joints creaking from stress, he bends to lift it out of the cobweb of dust that has already settled over it. It looks well cared for and expensive, which confuses him, because, of course, he’s just found it on the floor of a pawnshop. Well cared for and expensive things don’t belong on the floor of a pawnshop.

So he takes it to the counter, explaining to the broker that he’s just found it (the broker has dirt under his fingernails and some of it gets on the locket when he touches it). The broker says he’ll put it in their lost and found pile, but Castiel has yet to see a pawnshop with a lost and found pile, and there’s a glitter to the broker’s eye that he distrusts for no articulable reason. He curls the fingers of one hand into his palm, wishing he’d never shown the locket. It’s important, he thinks, so he asks for it back.

The pawnbroker, who is acting within the rights that are inscribed on a red plastic sign behind his head, refuses.

Castiel employs a tactical method that he learned from Dean. He has never yet seen it fail. He draws himself up, straightens his shoulders, and says, with all the authority he can muster, “Finders keepers. Losers weepers.”

Ξ

He is escorted out of the pawnshop with a forceful shove to his back. Someone on his or her way in bumps into his elbow.

“What happened?” Hannah, leaning against the curved hood of the car with a well-worn paperback book in hand, asks.

“I lost,” Castiel answers, his features pulling downward. “But I’m not a weeper.”

Hannah disregards this last phrase, as she disregards many things Castiel says that she does not understand. Castiel calls them “colloquialisms”. Hannah calls them “unintelligible nonsense.”

Instead, she blinks hard against the setting sun and closes her book. “Castiel, we need those maps. It’s getting dark.”

“Yes, I understand that, but – ”

He is cut off by a shout from inside the pawnshop. Hannah drops her book, Castiel reaches inside of his jacket pocket for a blade, and they run. Not, as one with a fully grasped semblance of sanity would, away from the door, but toward it.

“You’re a fucking crook,” a girl is shouting, her back to Castiel and Hannah. Castiel is sure that even the tips of her blond hair are shaking with anger. “I was just here, you saw me! That’s my locket, look inside, it has my initials in it. Give it back to me!”

The pawnbroker is unfazed. In fact, his leer deepens, and that look disturbs Castiel even more than the glittering eye he’d just seen. “Sorry, little lady,” he barks condescendingly. “You leave your shit here, I’m sellin’ it. Them’s the rules.”

The girl’s hand flies to her hip, where Castiel spots a flash of silver, tucked into her waistband. He steps forward, Hannah mirroring his movement. “Everyone calm down,” he says, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

She flinches at his touch, whirling around as if to scream at him as well. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t say a word. She stares at him, stiff and motionless. Castiel, bizarrely, thinks her face looks like that of a creature frozen in ice, centuries or millennia ago. That it was trapped in a glacier at the top of a mountain, and all of these years, the glacier has slid, down and down, inch by inch, melting slowly over the span of eons, and he has finally come eye-to-eye with that creature, staring at him through that last preserving glaze of ice.

Those are my eyes, Castiel thinks dumbly.

“Dad?” the girl whispers, and Castiel is shuttled years back to the moment where the creature had lied down to die in the snow. I am not your father, he remembers saying, and he says it again now, before his mind can cast the line to reel the words back in.

The ice shatters and rains all over him. Her entire face winks, and Castiel is unable to comprehend the emotions that pass over it before it settles on stark horror and she is fleeing the shop, pushing past Hannah in her haste, stumbling out of the door.

Castiel does not know how to react, so he turns to the pawnbroker and asks how much for the locket.

Ξ

The girl is standing across the pawnshop lot at the edge of the highway, her hand halfway out as if imitating a hitchhiker, but she isn’t moving. Castiel approaches from behind, her locket gripped tight in his hand, and says, “Claire,” because that is her name, and how could he forget? Claire Novak.

Her body jerks as though the use of the name had been a physical slap. “You don’t get to call me that,” she says. Her voice is trembling. She doesn’t turn to look at him.

“That’s… still your name, correct?” Castiel asks.

“You don’t get to call me that,” Claire repeats. “He picked it out. You don’t get to call me that.”

Castiel looks down at his hands and tries to remember ever having had another pair. He doesn’t remember if Jimmy was his first vessel or his hundredth. He doesn’t remember how it feels to be free, untethered, a being of undiluted light sharing a home in the atmosphere. He wonders how much Jimmy remembered from his childhood as an adult. If he remembered what shaped him into the person he was, the person he became. He wonders if any human does. Or if it’s some sort of ever-form. This is who I am, so this is who I am.

“I’m sorry,” Castiel says, because he is, and because he cannot stop looking at his – at Jimmy’s – at _his_ – hands. 

Claire’s shoulders hunch forward. Her half-extended arm drops to her side. “You don’t get to say that either.”

Ξ

Castiel hands her back her locket once she agrees to stop trying to leave. The chain for it had broken, so she loops it onto her second necklace, one bearing a plain metal cross. She puts her hand over it. “He gave it to me for my tenth birthday.”

Castiel catches himself before he says “I’m sorry” again, because she told him not to say it. Instead he says, “It looks beautiful on you,” and she says, “He thought so too.”

Hannah comes out from where she had been waiting in the car. She approaches slowly, as if Claire were a wounded animal. Claire looks at her. “Are you one too?”

“An angel? Yes. I am.”

Claire rolls her eyes to the sky. Don’t bother, Castiel wants to say. It’s empty up there now.

“Is he dead?” She asks the question very suddenly, in one breath, in a rush, and it takes a moment for Castiel to process it.

He looks at his hands again. At the small scar just under a knuckle on his left hand. At the calluses forming on his fingertips. “Yes,” he says, because he is not a fan of what Sam calls “beating around the bush”.

Claire’s fingers skitter over the locket, pressing down on the side clasp, though not hard enough for it to spring open. Castiel is vividly reminded of Dean’s attachment to his old amulet, his reluctance to let it go, and he thinks the gesture may be one of comfort.

“He’s in his Heaven,” Hannah says, to Castiel’s surprise. She looks vaguely uncomfortable speaking to this girl she doesn’t know, but she attempts it in any case. “Reliving his best memories. He gets to see you every day. He’s happy.”

Castiel wouldn’t normally think that would be of any comfort to anyone, but something shifts in Claire, and she tilts her head back down. There is silence for a long while, during which they all struggle to find something more to say. The sunset has called forth night, and behind them a streetlight flickers feebly on. The cicadas crawl out of dormancy and start up their orchestra. Somewhere far away, a glacier starts to melt.

“Well,” Claire says at last. Her face is smooth, though Castiel sees hurricanes brewing in those eyes. “Are you gonna give me a ride or what?”


End file.
